Lucy, a mother of a 22-year-old inmate in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, discusses the conditions there, her son’s fight to get out, and the system he is up against
My son was arrested June 2023 on an attempted murder. They arrested him and put him in general population, and that’s where the harassment began. The inmates pick a fight with everybody that’s coming in new, and when you complain about it, the jail’s response is, “Well, it’s jail”. He was sent to super Max division nine, which everybody says that’s the worst division ever. There were stories about people getting attacked, getting beat up, held for ransom. And he experienced all those things. My son’s not in a gang so when they find out you’re alone, the harassment gets worse. So one time he defended himself and fought back, and that’s when he got jumped in the bathroom and they broke his jaw.
He would call me maybe once a day and I didn’t receive a phone call for about a week. I grew very worried and concerned so I looked online and found out he was in the hospital. So I went down to the hospital and it turns out they didn’t have surgery for his jaw. It took about another week. He told me a horror story of when he went to the hospital wing, there were a couple of guys who’d be walking around with their jaws hanging off their face. They had gotten into a fight and their surgery wasn’t scheduled until weeks away. I couldn’t believe it.
We are just trying to get him home. The lawyer situation is that they don’t really want to work until they get paid in full, so they will drag out the case. Every time we go to court the lawyer says he never got the paperwork and the state says they sent it. Every court date. I know my lawyer is stalling to get paid. I wish I got a public defender, but then when you get the public defender you wonder should I have gotten a regular lawyer. Both are a waste. The evidence takes forever to come back. It took us a whole year to get a video tape of someone supposedly walking in and out of a rec center. Which to me is totally ridiculous.
He’s been in there for over a year and they still haven’t found any evidence against my son. The police towed my car and took the radio out, saying their was GPS that showed where my car was during the time of the shooting. There was nothing found on the GPS. They dusted for gunshot residue, there was none. There was no bullet casings and there was no gun. To me, there’s no evidence. They said my car was in the area of the shooting, which we live in the area of the shooting so of course my car would be in the area. But the lawyer is trying to tell me that that is damaging to his case, which is ridiculous because it’s all circumstantial. He’s trying to get my son to take a plea deal. It’s a lesser sentence, reckless endangerment with a firearm, which carries 4 to 30 years and you can do 4 at 50%, so he would do at least 6 more months. But it would still be a felony on his name instead of them dropping the charges because there is no evidence. We feel like the lawyer is working with the state to convict him.
The other guys in there will say if they offer you less than 5, take it. Because to try to go to trial and fight it that can take up to 5 years. So they make it not to your benefit to even fight it, you will want to go with a lesser charge. And if he tries to fight the attempted murder charge and loses, his life is over. It’s really unfair. It’s a lose, lose situation.
Hopefully he will come home soon, but his mood is up and down. He gets depressed about being in jail, about the conditions, and being without his freedom. They just don’t supply them with the correct things. When he first went in, he didn’t have socks. His feet were black from the shoes he had there. They didn’t give him underwear. If you don’t buy these things, you don’t get them, like toothpaste, toothbrush, t shirt. Then it gets really cold in there. If you don’t have someone who loves you on the outside sending you money then you really suffer. Then the mail. I try to keep his spirits up and get him some books he would like. I have sent him 5 books, directly from Amazon, that have been confiscated. They don’t even return them to me. They will give my son a slip of paper saying they suspect drugs contaminating the paper. If the jail suspects the books have drugs on them, why don’t the call me or investigate me or say something to me? Any time there is a good book I send him, it disappears. That’s all they have in there. And it’s just unfortunate they take away the last source of entertainment. They will return pictures we send to him, saying they think they are contaminated, but won’t return the books. It’s totally unfair. And it gets expensive.
He had his own apartment, his own car, nice things; he lost all of that. When he gets depressed, I can hear it in his voice and I try to give him a little pep talk. We come to visit him every weekend but it’s hard. They always say, the county jail is the worst of the worst.
Cracks At Hotel California is a newsletter that exposes the daily reality of torture, murder, and mistreatment inside of the Cook County jail. We believe that the people who can best tell the truth about what’s happening are the people on the inside and their loved ones on the outside. This newsletter is produced by Dare to Struggle, an organization committed to standing with the people subjected to the horrors of the American nightmare. Send us your story…
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